The Technological Nature of “New Sincerity”

Abstract

Changes in modern communication have led to the transformation of the category of sincerity into a technology (or strategy) of persuasive influence. Increased sensitivity and the illusion of displaying genuine emotions are used not for frank self-expression, but for achieving commercial, ideological, and other goals. In the article, “new sincerity” is examined from the perspective of communication theory and the understanding of effective strategies by communication participants. It is argued that “new sincerity” has several variations with different sets of substantive components. Four models of new sincerity are characterized, each structured according to the significant components identified during the analysis: the scope of the concept of sincerity, the subject of sincerity, the object of influence, the instrument of influence, the conceptual core (integral component), qualifiers of the concept, type of activity; means of carrying out the activity; expected result of the activity. The assumption is made that variations in understanding the linguistic unit new sincerity have emerged as a result of the universality of its structural-and-semantic contour. It is suggested that the word sincerity originally had potential for future transformations due to the practical properties of the reality it denotes. It is shown that the awareness of the unique properties of sincerity has led to its transformation into insincere sincerity as a technology for attracting audiences of different types with different goals.

Keywords

• new sincerity
• effective strategy
• reproducible speech technologies
• online communication
• institutional discourse
• personality-oriented discourse